Hugh Hewitt’s “Outside the Tent” piece appears in this morning’s L.A. Times. Its title is Cover the Terror War as a War.

What Hugh has done is admirable. He properly considers the war on terror to be the main issue facing the country, so he has put aside his concerns about liberal bias, in order to encourage the paper to do a proper job of covering the war.

Hugh’s approach may also reflect a realization that it is impossible to make a comprehensive case for the paper’s liberal bias in the few paragraphs allotted to him.

If I am invited to contribute to this feature, my guess is that I will push a long-standing idea of mine: place important corrections in a more prominent space in the paper. If an error is substantive, the correction should be as prominent as the original story. If the error undermines the fundamental premise of a story, the paper should run an entirely new story explaining the error and its significance. Not only will this keep readers better informed, since they will be more likely to see the correction, but it might also be an added incentive to get important stories right the first time.

With Xrlq’s help, I have implemented the “nofollow” tag on my site. Comment spammers can spam away, but their spams will no longer help their search engine rankings.

Can anyone tell me the MySQL query to shut down comments from the beginning of my blog through 12-31-04?

UPDATE: Never mind. I have figured out a way to implement the “close comments” plug-in mentioned by SayUncle in the first comment below.

What this means for you is that you are no longer able to comment on any post that is 21 days old or older. If anyone has a specific desire to comment on any such post, feel free to e-mail me. I am willing to re-open specific threads upon request.

I am sorry to have to take this measure, but I am told it will drastically reduce the amount of comment spam I have to deal with. That’s a very good thing.